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Saturday, January 19, 2013

Council leaders should pay heed to Kinnock's warning

Earlier this week I tuned in to an interesting radio discussion
about whether, in the era of instant communication via text messaging, email
and Twitter, set-piece political speeches still retained any relevance.

The discussion had been precipitated by perhaps the most
long-awaited and over-hyped set-piece political speech of recent times – Prime
Minister David Cameron’s planned address on Britain’s relationship with Europe.

The consensus was that, while such speeches still had their
place, it helped if the politician concerned had something new and original to
say – as for instance Margaret Thatcher did in her famous Bruges speech of 1988
when she set her face against a federal Europe.

In that respect, perhaps it was a good thing that Mr
Cameron’s proposed speech ended up being postponed, given the expectation among
commentators that it would say little to appease his increasingly Eurosceptic
backbenchers.

But if Bruges was, for those on the right of politics, the setting
for the seminal political speech of modern times, those of a Labour disposition
tend to look to another town beginning with B – namely Bournemouth.

For that was where, in 1985, Neil Kinnock delivered the
Labour conference address subsequently credited with launching the party on the
long road to recovery after the wilderness years of the early 1980s.

The historical significance of the speech was that it marked
the start of a fightback by Labour modernisers against a hard left faction
which had rendered the party unelectable.

This process of internal renewal would eventually lead to
the creation of New Labour and, electorally speaking at any rate, the most
successful period in the party’s history.

But in an era in which a Conservative-led government is once
again imposing spending cutbacks on Labour-run councils, could Mr Kinnock’s
great speech have a new relevance for today?

What he was railing against in Bournemouth was the kind of
gesture politics typified, not just by Militant-controlled Liverpool City Council,
but by a host of other Labour authorities of the era who used budget cuts as a
means of ratcheting up political pressure on the government.

The key sentence in the speech was Mr Kinnock’s warning –
delivered in the face of a heckling Derek Hatton – that “you can’t play
politics with people’s jobs, or with people’s homes, or with people’s
services.”

And more than a quarter of a century on, it’s people’s
services that are once again at stake in Newcastle, as the city council decides
how to implement what it claims are the £90m worth of savings demanded by the
Con-Lib coalition at Westminster.

Council leader Nick Forbes’ decision to target some of the
cutbacks at libraries and the arts has caused deep and bitter controversy in
the region, but is actually nothing new in the annals of Labour local
authorities.

Whether consciously or otherwise, he has taken a leaf out of
the book of David Bookbinder, the left-wing firebrand who led Derbyshire County
Council at the same time as Mr Hatton was running Liverpool.

Faced with a similar set of cutbacks in the 1980s, Mr
Bookbinder decided to take the axe to a series of libraries in Tory-voting
middle-class areas as well as scrapping school music tuition.

But just as Derbyshire’s voters saw through his attempts to
blame the government for the sorry situation, so Newcastle’s are increasingly
beginning to question who is really to blame for the present-day cutbacks.

Save Newcastle Libraries campaigner Lee Hall has made clear
his own view on the matter, accusing Councillor Forbes in a speech last week of
wanting to “make a name for himself” and wanting “a platform to rail at the
Coalition.”

“Instead of trying to protect our libraries, our enormously
successful arts organisations, Forbes, for his own political aggrandisement, is
trying to cut as much as possible,” he said.

David Bookbinder’s unique brand of showmanship made
Derbyshire a great place to be a local government reporter in the 1980s, but
ultimately his attempts to play politics with people’s services did Labour no favours
in the county.

Perhaps Councillor Forbes, too, should now take heed of Mr
Kinnock’s wise words of warning.

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"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Denis Healey, writing about Roy Jenkins in "The Time of My Life."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a series of far-fetched resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'll tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's homes and with people's services."

Neil Kinnock, Bournemouth 1985

"But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn't take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

"That's how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man's life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own reputation to be the core value his country must defend."

Hugo Young, on the death of Dr David Kelly, 2003

"The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."